Bennett iview, 2010
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your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. I’m working on it!
(ale deleuze to tam ma popisane)
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problem vytvarania podobnosti:
it is easy to get carried away and 1) forget that analogies are slippery and often misleading because they can highlight (what turn out to be) insignificant or non-salient-to-the-task-at-hand resemblances, 2) forget that your body-and-its-operations is not an ideal or pinnacle of evolution, but just the body you have; 3) forget that the human body is itself a composite of many different it-bodies, including bacteria, viruses, metals, etc. and that when we recognize a resemblance between a human form and a nonhuman one, sometimes the connecting link is a shared inorganicism. I think that anthropomorphizing can be a valuable technique for building an ecological sensibility in oneself, but of course it is insufficient to the task.
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I also suggest that a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages could translate into a national politics that was not so focused around a juridical model of moral responsibility, blame, and punishment.
Bennett, Edible Matter
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In this essay, I seek to bring to the fore this vital power as it exists within
nonhuman ‘actants’.3 Bruno Latour defines an actant as ‘something that
acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation
of human individual actors, nor of humans in general.’4 Proceeding
from this definition, I will horizontalize the relations between humans,
biota and abiota—presenting all of them as actors vying for efficacy.